In this paper, we present a carrier phase recovery (CPR) algorithm using a modified superscalar parallelization based phase locked loop (M-SSP-PLL) combined with a maximum-likelihood (ML) phase estimation. Compared to the original SSP-PLL, M-SSP-PLL + ML reduces the required buffer size using a novel superscalar structure. In addition, by removing the differential coding/decoding and employing ML phase recovery it also improves the performance. In simulation, we show that the laser linewidth

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... erance of M-SSP-PLL + ML is comparable to blind phase search (BPS) algorithm, which is known to be one of the best CPR algorithms in terms of performance for arbitrary QAM formats. In 28 Gbaud QPSK (112 Gb/s) and 16-QAM (224 Gb/s), and 7 Gbaud 64-QAM (84 Gb/s) experiments, it is also demonstrated that M-SSP-PLL + ML can increase the transmission distance by at least 12% compared to BPS for each of them. Finally, the computational complexity is discussed and a significant reduction is shown for our algorithm with respect to BPS.